Dear Armin,
you have dedicated your life, and your career, to this code base. It is impossible to recount your work in detail, that now spans three decades - beginning during the StarOffice/StarDivision times, continuing with OpenOffice.org, then Apache OpenOffice, then LibreOffice.
On behalf of everyone who benefitted from your feature work, code cleanup, vision, dedication & inspiration, to get nice graphics, excellent usability, and maintainable code into the mess you had inherited: we owe you eternal gratitude, and we thank you for having turned many an area into properly architected, well-working, sometimes even beautiful code!
I’m sure I will miss many bits here, apologies – but it’s too much to list, so here’s just the highlights:
- reworked svx & draw shapes into something that was not completely buggy
- converted a code base using ad-hoc 1970-style graphics into using modern primitives, floating-point arithmetic & affine transformations in many places
- implemented the entirety of the OpenOffice 3D engine & shape support
- maintained the higher-level graphics stack, as well as the Draw and Impress document cores, for more than 20 years
- cleaned-up, isolated, then shunted into a separate binary the old StarDivision binary filters, leading a remote team of engineers to help with that on the side (the binfilter project) – thus freeing the rest of the engineers to rid the document models of pointless legacy
- implemented drawing layer primitives, a scene-graph approach to graphics, in an almost two-decade project, and kept iteratively migrating the LibreOffice applications to use that (while keeping everything well-oiled & working all the time)
- re-architected the fundamental data structures powering LibreOffice’s document models, and the semantics of attributes, styles & formatting (
SfxItemSet) - led the work implementing proper SmartArt support for LibreOffice, based on the oox code, but massaging & transforming it, so it could be used live, from the document models
Thanks a million, and it is an honour, and a great pleasure, to work alongside with you for so many years!